Dr. Jacqueline Washington, (above) chair and professor of the Nyack College Biology and Chemistry Department announced recently that Nyack has been selected as a Partner Instructor School to join The Center for Scientific Teaching at Yale University’s Small World Initiative: Crowdsourcing the Discovery of Antibiotics.

Numerous experts have recommended that all undergraduate students should be introduced to authentic scientific research at the introductory level, regardless of their major by replacing traditional cookbook labs with lab discovery research courses. Research has shown that students benefit greatly as discovery-based instruction engages students, allows them to have ownership, stimulates their curiosity, and promotes deep, long lasting learning.

This project exposes students to a worldwide antibiotic crisis–-most pharmaceutical companies have moved away from the development of new antibiotics to the pursuit of more lucrative drugs and the majority of the antibiotics that are now available are ineffective due to antibiotic resistance of pathogens. Consequently, there are increasing incidences in which there are no effective drugs available to treat infections.

In the Small World Initiative course students isolate, characterize, and identify antibiotic producing bacteria from soil in the hopes of finding novel bacteria. The majority of antibiotics available today were found in soil dwelling microbes.